According to T3, the motion sensor in the Kinect is made up of two elements: a projector that fires out a laser to scan your living room and an infrared VGA camera that tracks that laser and records what it bounces off of. The Kinect then interprets the pixels from that VGA camera image and run it through a software filter, which figures out what objects the camera is seeing are humanoid and which aren’t.

Basically, the Kinect, as a gadget, is mostly $150 dollars worth of hardware trying to figure out if a “player” is a human, or just an end table or a couch. The Kinect might not be a very good game controller, but it’ll be interesting to see what hackers and makers do with the peripheral: there’s clearly some pretty cool tech and software baked into this thing.